Wednesday, April 30, 2008

One-Hundred-Eighty-Seven

Inside out...

Do I make you dream?

Do I make you wet?

Do I make you shiver?

Good for you...

It’s this blog existance meaning...

Enjoy this inside out sexual flash moments...

* * * * *

( from Sharing Sexual Flash Moments )

* * * * *

Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

One-Hundred-Eighty-Six

Love and sex conflict and convergence...

Loving you too much, makes me vulnerable...

Making long and gentle sex to you makes me softer...

The sex beast that leaves in me, gets sleepy...

Mixing up my feelings and deeper thoughts...

Am I being addicted to love?

* * * * *

( from Sharing Sexual Flash Moments )

* * * * *

Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Sunday, April 27, 2008

One-Hundred-Eighty-Five

Lost Souls

Following our last conversation about sharing sexual flash moments...

I’m sure you wonder as well as I do...

How come that so beautiful girls...

Deliver themselves to completely debauchery sexual lives...

There must be something else than just an easy way of life...

More than carnal need, they must be first...

Lost souls...

* * * * *

( from Sharing Sexual Flash Moments )

* * * * *

Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

One-Hundred-Eighty-Four

Please don’t say you’re sorry...

It was love at first sight!...

In a glance, I took proper notice of your wonderful body lines...

I felt adrenalin all over my body...

And becoming hard on, just imagining you and me...

In a sexual flash moment...

I got your positive feedback and soon we were talking...

And touching...

Sooner or later we would make love...

Just a matter of time...

That intimate moments came few days later...

After a wonderful evening...

Where you were the star and I was the lucky guy...

Please don’t say you’re sorry...

* * * * *

( from Sharing Sexual Flash Moments )

* * * * *

Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

One-Hundred-Eighty-Three

Paul Raymond: Self-styled ‘King of Soho’ who built a successful business empire from property and pornography
Raymond eventually settled in London where he again exploited a loophole in the law that allowed private members’ clubs to be virtually exempt from censorship from the London Guardian (March 2008)

The self-styled “King of Soho”, Paul Raymond was a self-made millionaire and pioneering sex mogul whose x-rated career spanned seven decades from coy post-war striptease to the hardcore world of the internet. He brought pornography out from under the counters of tatty corner shops and onto the top shelves of WH Smith, giving bare breasts a sophisticated sheen and earning himself a £650m fortune along the way.

Once described as “the most successful man in modern London who isn’t an aristocrat”, Raymond was the original British porn baron, a free-thinking entrepreneur who made nudity mainstream, yet preferred to be remembered as a theatrical impresario. He believed that sex didn’t have to be tawdry, hidden away in seedy strip joints. For him, “adult entertainment” was just that; a privilege of getting older and something to be enjoyed without embarrassment. “There’ll always be sex,” he said. “Always, always, always.”

He was born Geoffrey Anthony Quinn in 1925, the son of a Liverpool lorry driver, and was raised by his mother and aunt in Glossop, Derbyshire, after his father abandoned the family. On leaving school at 15, he sold hair nets and stockings from a barrow but hankered for a life in show business. He changed his name to Paul Raymond in 1942 and tagged onto the variety circuit, ending up as one half of a bizarre mind-reading double act on Clacton Pier called “Mister and Miss Tree”.

From performer he became producer and married Jean, a choreographer of dancing showgirls. Their first travelling variety show – The Vaudeville Express – featured topless girls who posed in saucy tableaux but remained completely still so as not to trouble the Lord Chamberlain, who had prohibited any jiggling by half-dressed performers. Raymond’s show eventually evolved into the Festival of Nudes (a cheeky wink at the Festival of Britain) and then Moving Nudes, where naked lovelies were winched high in the air on precarious wooden platforms.

Tiring of touring, Raymond eventually settled in London where he again exploited a loophole in the law that allowed private members’ clubs to be virtually exempt from censorship. The Raymond Revuebar, located on the corner of Walker’s Court and Brewer Street in Soho, opened in April 1958 promising a programme of striptease and beautiful girls. The venue’s garish neon display became as much a London landmark as the statue of Eros, emblazoned with the legend “The World Centre of Erotic Entertainment”. Raymond’s new venture was the first of its kind in Britain and regularly played to packed audiences of middle-class men seeking new nude thrills.

In 1961 a judge labelled the club “filthy, disgusting and beastly” and fined him £5,000 for keeping a disorderly house, but it barely dented Raymond’s burgeoning fortune. By the mid-1960s he had made his first million and was driving a black Rolls Royce, plate number PR11, and living in a mansion in Wimbledon.

Buoyed up by the success of his live shows, Raymond launched, in 1964, King (the “real man’s magazine"), distinguished by lush photographic studies of “tasteful” nudes and the obligatory articles on motor cars, cigars and military history. Designed as a British competitor to Penthouse or Playboy, the title was, surprisingly, not a runaway success and instead Raymond put his energies into buying the Whitehall Theatre. Here he staged extravagant nude revues including Pyjama Tops and its sequel Yes, We Have No Pyjamas, as well as Let’s Get Laid! and Come Into My Bed, which paired “family” comedians like John Inman with troupes of topless dancers.

Raymond’s biggest coup came in 1971 when he acquired the magazine Men Only. He was now dating the glamour model Fiona Richmond, and promptly installed his pneumatic new girlfriend as Men Only’s nominal editor-in-chief. Richmond became a household name as her self-penned articles documented her travels through the UK “road-testing men”. Other magazines, including Club International, Mayfair and Escort, would also be published by Raymond, following a format of porn presented as glossy Sunday supplement.

In 1974 Raymond divorced his wife, Jean, and she received a settlement of £250,000 after he admitted his affair. With Richmond established as his star attraction, Raymond bankrolled her first major film, Exposé (1975), a menacing sex drama full of blood, gore, surgical gloves and gratuitous lesbian love scenes. The film later enjoyed the distinction of being the only British entry on the infamous “video nasty” list compiled by the Department of Public Prosecutions.

Raymond stumped up the cash for two further Richmond romps – Hardcore and Let’s Get Laid! The former headlined the relaunch of Soho’s Moulin Cinema in Great Windmill Street in April 1977. A beaming Richmond posed for reporters outside the cinema with a selection of bananas and cucumbers. But no amount of fruity publicity could save the movie and Hardcore flopped when up against the sex comedy Come Play with Me, financed by Raymond’s porn-baron rival, David Sullivan.

Known for his long straggly hair, sharp suits and bevy of glamorous companions, Raymond became a larger-than-life figure in the West End but his association with pornography never afforded him the mainstream respectability he desired. In 1980 he returned to movie production with Paul Raymond’s Erotica, arguably the most expensive vanity project of his career.

Budgeted at £1.5m, the film starred the French starlet Brigitte Lahaie as a young investigative reporter seducing half of London. If cinema-goers weren’t put off by a sex scene set in Smithfield meat market then they certainly were by Raymond’s woeful attempts at acting. The Daily Express critic reported that it was impossible to hear the film’s dialogue over the sound of cinema seats snapping up as disillusioned patrons fled the auditoria. Raymond didn’t appear on screen again and, hurt by the commercial failure of the film, slunk back to relative anonymity running his publishing and property empire.

Raymond had started buying up huge swathes of Soho during the 1970s after a crackdown on unlicensed sex shops and peep-show premises by the Obscene Publications Squad. Again, after the property crash of the late 1980s, he started buying more freeholds. By the end of the following decade, he owned nearly 60 of the 87 acres in the district and had practically cornered the market in legitimate sex-shop outlets.

As Raymond neared retirement age he began grooming his daughter to take over the family business. Unfortunately, the flamboyant and undeniably talented Debbie Raymond, a former dancer at the Revuebar, had an addictive personality and died in 1992 after an accidental drug overdose, aged just 36. It was a tragedy from which Raymond never fully recovered and he became increasingly reclusive, rarely leaving his suite next door to the Ritz. His stranglehold on the business further loosened through the decade and, in 2000, his GP-brother Philip became director of the sex and mortar empire.

The Raymond Organisation also gave up the day-to-day running of the Revuebar and sold its name to the choreographer Gerard Simi. In February 2004, the business ceased operating after Simi claimed he could not afford the £270,000-a-year rent. Raymond’s iconic building is now occupied by a gay cabaret bar.

Simon Sheridan

Beneath the slight stammer and gentlemanly manners, Paul Raymond was often ruthless with rivals, former associates and even his own sons, writes Pierre Perrone.

I worked for Paul Raymond Publications for over 20 years, editing a French magazine and then the flagship title Men Only as well. When I joined the company in 1986, there was much to admire about Raymond’s instincts for tapping into Britain’s then unsated appetite for erotica. As a publisher, his eye for the smallest of details was still there, and he was prepared to back his hunches that France, Belgium, Switzerland and Canada would buy a French-language equivalent of his classier magazine.

When the French government took a dim view of what Club Pour Hommes was trying to do – taking coals back to Newcastle in an “ooh la la” fashion, basically – and threatened to confiscate the title in the mid-1980s, Raymond hired a commanding law firm and threatened to take the case to the European courts before deciding that a change of title to Club Edition Française for France might just do the trick and enable us to carry on publishing, which we did successfully for many years.

However, after his beloved daughter Debbie died in 1992 there was a definite darkening of mood. Gone were the publicity stunts over the unlikely purchase of a football club. Gone was the dabbling in theatre and film production which had made Fiona Richmond a household name. Raymond became an elusive figure, more interested in building his property empire than broadening his range of publications.

By the time the publishing side of his many companies eventually decided to invest in DVD cover-mounts and a stand-alone website, Raymond’s magazines were caught between an increasingly liberal attitude to the import of hardcore material from continental Europe, the proliferation of x-rated internet content and lads’ mags like Loaded, Zoo and Nuts. By the mid 2000s, the market was shrinking, with Men Only and Club International selling a 10th of what they had in their heyday, and there was an unsuccessful attempt to offload the publishing company.

After many years editing the French titles, I was also asked to edit concurrently Men Only, a magazine which had gone through five editors in the previous 10 years. When this experiment did not achieve the desired sales spike, I was taken off the English title and continued editing the French title, which I had launched 20 years before with Debbie. Shortly afterwards, I was made redundant. I had to take the company to court in order to secure a fair settlement. The tactics used by some of Paul Raymond’s directors throughout the redundancy process and the subsequent shenanigans of his legal team “beggared belief”, said the judge, who ruled in my favour.

Paul Raymond may still have had the appetite for a legal fight but his showman attributes had long deserted him. The man who had once bought a mind-reading act, and said his younger self “was a total spiv”, had reverted to type.

Geoffrey Anthony Quinn (Paul Raymond), entrepreneur, publisher and property magnate: born Liverpool 15 November 1925; married 1951 Jean Bradley (one son, and one daughter deceased; marriage dissolved 1974), (one son with Noreen O’Horan); died London 2 March 2008.

* * * * *
Paul Raymond heirs to clean up in Soho
Girls in line for huge property estate, say Ben Laurance and Martin Tomkinson, London Times (March 2008)

THEY are young: Fawn James is 22 and her sister, India Rose James, is just 16. They live in Home Counties comfort, sharing a house with their father near Woking in Surrey.

And these two lively, attractive sisters sit on a fortune - from an empire that was built on the profits of pornography, and which controls swathes of prime London property.

The death last weekend of Paul Raymond - the man whose wealth was built with magazines such as Men Only and Club International - means one of Britain’s most successful private property firms is about to pass to a new generation. India Rose and Fawn - or, at least, trusts set up for their benefit - find themselves controlling property worth hundreds of millions of pounds.

For Raymond, porn was certainly profitable. He made his first money by launching Raymond’s Revue Bar in 1957, taking over the Whitehall Theatre in the 1960s and the Windmill Theatre in 1974. But the launch of Men Only in 1971 was to prove the first building block of a publishing empire that would finance his property investments. In 1993, Paul Raymond Publications made a pretax profit of £15m on turnover of £25m. By 1998, profits were £21.5m on turnover of £28m - an astonishing margin that others at the respectable end of publishing could only dream about.

And amazingly, even with the growth of the internet, giving easy, cheap availability to much more hardcore material, Raymond’s publishing profits continued to roll in after the turn of the millennium. Accounts show that in 2005, Paul Raymond Publications turned a profit of £8m on sales of £16.7m. About 15% of the business was in America, and there were offshoots in Belgium, France and Poland.

Porn was not the source of Raymond’s serious wealth, though. His masterstroke was to realise in the 1970s that Soho, in the heart of central London, was cheap. It was dirty, run-down and sleazy. Corruption in Scotland Yard’s Obscene Publications Squad meant it had become well-nigh impossible to obtain obscenity convictions in the courts. Soho was packed with hardcore film clubs. Westminster council appeared powerless to do anything about it.

Raymond would turn up at property auctions wearing one of his trademark fur coats and quietly bought up a string of properties. To begin with, he profited from the sleaze. Take one example: a Maltese-born Soho businessman, Charlie Grech, was paying Raymond £3,000 a week to rent a tiny cinema - and that was in 1980.

But whatever happened to Soho, Raymond couldn’t lose. Either he kept on collecting high rents from fly-by-night operators in the sex industry or Soho lifted itself into respectability.

Cannily, Raymond avoided being drawn into the corruption that blighted the area. He dealt with gangsters, but he wasn’t one himself.

He had been fined £5,000 in 1961 for “running a disorderly house” - the quaint legal description of the girlie show at his Revue Bar, but he avoided bribing policemen.

In the end, Soho was smartened up. Westminster council used the 1982 Local Government Act to clamp down on the porn merchants, introducing a strict licensing system for “adult” book shops and cinema clubs. The area was gradually transformed into a centre of the burgeoning industries of advertising, television and magazine publishers, eager to be based in the heart of London’s West End.

By 1987, Raymond was collecting rents from 136 properties in the area. He was a tough and unsentimental landlord. He jacked up his rents. Pizza Express founder Peter Boizot was the tenant of a restaurant that had been charged £90,000 a year. Raymond demanded £400,000. Boizot ruefully reflected: “I used to think Paul Raymond’s god was sex; now I know it’s money.” In the end, the rent was fixed at £235,000.

Raymond’s other strength was that he had sufficient cash to avoid relying on outside finance. There were no external directors to satisfy, no outside shareholders clamouring for dividends or City advisers trying to push him into their pet schemes.

The most recent figures for Raymond’s property business, Soho Estates Holdings, show just how conservatively it has been run. The 2006 accounts show investment properties valued at £290m - but this figure was struck in 2003, so doesn’t take into account the rise in property values over the past five years. The company had £27m in cash. And - strikingly for a property company - bank borrowings of zero.

Over the year, the company paid out dividends of only £1.3m - chicken-feed compared with the tens of millions paid in previous years. The highest-paid director - presumably Raymond himself - received £386,000.

In his declining years, as he whiled away his days drinking brandy in his flat near the Ritz in central London, Raymond became increasingly isolated. He had been devastated by the death of his daughter Debbie in 1992 and ventured out less and less. But sporadically, he would take sums out of his businesses in the form of dividends. He took £15m from Paul Raymond Publications in 2005 - equivalent to almost twice pretax profits.

Earlier - before a corporate reorganisation four years ago - one of his companies, Paul Raymond Organisation, had paid him a dividend of £2m in 2001, a further £2m in 2002 and £4.6m in 2003. During the 1990s, most of his payouts were taken from Soho Estates.

Since Raymond’s death, it has been widely suggested that he was probably worth about £650m. Some believe the real figure was far more. He was always rumoured to have assets overseas, but there is no public record of them. “His empire is worth billions, not the £650m that has been reported,” said one former associate.

Raymond was widely disliked by tenants whose rents were pushed up to what he called “commercial levels”.

Colleagues and rivals in the property industry respected him, however. David Coffer, former chairman of Earls Court & Olym-pia, said: “I never forget the time that he came to bid for the Rialto cinema, which we were selling. His driver brought him to our office and he gave me his offer and I opened it up, and it was simply a cheque for £14.25m. We exchanged contracts in 48 hours. He was always the epitome of professionalism in his property dealings, precise and prompt in his terms.

“He was charming, a very interesting raconteur. His knowledge of the West End and its characters stretching back six decades was almost unrivalled.”

Raymond also commanded respect from people in the sex industry. Oscar Owide, owner of lap-dancing clubs in Soho, said: “I always found him very nice and charming. He was always impeccably dressed - he always wore a tie and had lovely shirts and suits. He was always very correct. In spite of all you read, I found him very generous.”

But Raymond was defensive about his status as Soho’s biggest landlord. On one occasion, a newspaper said that West End property developer Laurence Kirschel had more space in Soho than Raymond. Kirschel received a phone call from Raymond, who said simply: “That may be true, Laurence, but you’re missing the point: I have no loans.”

So why did Raymond have such an aversion to debt? One reason is that in the 1970s he became involved in a development that failed. “The banks crucified him for it,” said John Warden, a Raymond lieutenant for more than two decades.

But also, more than 80% of the shares in Soho Property Holdings are controlled by trusts, understood to be for the benefit of Raymond’s granddaughters Fawn and India Rose. In an interview some years ago, Warden indicated that the terms of the trusts made it hard for Soho Property Holdings to gear itself up. At that stage, in 2000, the two girls, then 15 and 11, received about £1m a year. Their father John James - widower of Raymond’s daughter Debbie, who died after bingeing on drink and drugs in 1992 - runs Soho Estates Holdings and is a trustee overseeing his daughters’ inheritance.

Warden said that some of the proceeds from Soho Estates Holdings would go to the girls when they reached adulthood; more would be handed out during their lifetimes.

What is not clear is whether Fawn and India Rose are still the main beneficiaries of Raymond’s will. Their mother Debbie was not Raymond’s only child - and towards the end of his life, the tycoon is understood to have had a rapprochement with his son Howard having previously become estranged (see below). Howard or his two children may benefit.

At 16, India Rose is too young to have any involvement with Raymond’s empire. But since September, Fawn has been a director of six Raymond companies.

Neither Fawn nor India Rose will struggle financially. From the seediness of Raymond’s Revue Bar to the respectability of property investment – their grandfather’s business acumen has left them wealthy.

OTHER HEIRS WHO MAY BE IN LINE FOR RAYMOND FORTUNE

PAUL RAYMOND was devastated by the death of his daughter Debbie from a lethal cocktail of drink and drugs in 1992. She was being groomed to take over the Raymond empire and it is thought most of the tycoon’s wealth has been left to her daughters, Fawn and India Rose. Their father, John James, has been running Raymond’s property company, Soho Estates Holdings, on a day-to-day basis since 1998.

But Raymond has two other children. The first is Derry McCarthy, the son of Raymond’s stage partner in an end-of-the-pier act that he performed in his youth. Derry was born in 1950.

Raymond’s other child is Howard, Debbie’s brother.

Howard Raymond is now 48, and is himself a director of two property companies, Provincial & Metropolitan Property and Provincial & Metropolitan Property Investment Company. He is also a director of a small leisure company, 1861, whose registered office was until recently given as Worksop Town Football Club.

The companies have not been notably successful and, in 2006, the Revenue obtained a winding-up order against Provincial & Metropolitan Property Investments Ltd. This order has recently been rescinded.

For much of Howard’s adult life, he was estranged from his father, but there had been periods of rapprochement. In 1979, one of Paul Raymond’s companies bought a house for Howard. In the 1980s, the two men fell out, when Howard had problems with drugs. “I was going for it in the mid1980s. Everyone was – seven grammes of coke a day was great,” Howard once told a reporter.

But, according to Howard, in recent years he managed to rebuild his relationship with his father. Paul’s companies once lent Howard’s businesses £166,500 in the early part of this decade, according to company accounts.

Howard was present at Paul Raymond’s deathbed. He said that recently he saw his father once a week or once a fortnight.

Whether the reconciliation was warm enough for Paul to leave money to Howard or his two offspring, Cheyenne and Boston, will be determined only when details of Raymond’s will emerge.

* * * * *

Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©